Black Holes

"What's this?" you may ask. The jet known as PKS 0637-752, a two million light year long structure. Much longer than Milky Way

It looks strikingly similar to the afterburner flow of a fighter jet, except in this case the jet engine is a supermassive black hole and the jet material is moving at nearly the speed of light. Holy cow

The jets are produced when material falls onto a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy, but many details beyond that remain unknown. Massive jets like this one have been studied for decades, since the beginning of radio astronomy, but astronomers still don't understand exactly how they are produced or what they're made of. This particular jet emits a lot of X-rays, which is hard to explain with current models.

Theories, theories, and more theories. You'd think that with the amount of money, human, and natural resources world governments spend of defense (against each other, no less), we'd have an NX-01 by now.

Wow I've posted so many times here I even forgot some of the older news/posts, I'll re-read them now It's exciting that scientists discover more and more. Anywho more new stuff:

Possibly the lowest mass nuclear black hole ever has been identified.

The black hole is located in the middle of the NGC 4178 (a galaxy located about 55 Mly from Earth) shown in this image from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. A known relationship between the mass of a black hole and the amount of X-rays and radio waves it generates was used to estimate the mass of the black hole. This method gives a black hole mass estimate of less than about 200 000 times that of the sun.

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As always scientists noticed inconsistency in their theoretical model. Because they thought that galaxies without bulges are unlikely to host supermassive black holes but NGC 4178 is a bulgeless galaxy. It may suggest that more than one mechanism is at work in forming supermassive black holes. Nothing is certain lol...

NASA has used its X-ray eyes in the sky, those on the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), to get a good look at the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy called Sagittarius A*. And it caught some interesting activity. Our typically mild-mannered black hole recently flared up, and NuSTAR saw all the action.

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Yeah, even our Galaxy's humble black hole can be active sometimes. It's a waking season. More activity to come. Just wait till 2013

A supermassive black hole that is bigger relative to its host galaxy than any measured before could be the fossil of a burned-out quasar that existed at the dawn of time. These black-hole-powered beacons were once among the brightest objects in the universe, and it is a mystery how they got so large and powerful so soon after the big bang.

Remco van den Bosch at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, and colleagues looked at the galaxy NGC 1277 with the Hubble Space Telescope and the Hobby-Eberly telescope in Texas. They found that stars move slowly in the galaxy's outer regions, but gyrate rapidly around the inner core.

That suggests gravity is strong in the galaxy's middle, implying that the central black hole is extremely massive. Based on stellar motion, the team calculates that the hole is 17 billion times the mass of our sun. Such a whopper wouldn't seem out of place in a galaxy hundreds of times the size of NGC 1277, but it is an oddity in a galaxy that is fairly small.

Until now, galaxies were thought to have central black holes that are in proportion to their size. Usually a supermassive black hole would have a mass only a tenth of a per cent that of the galaxy's central bulge, the oldest part of a galaxy, believed to form at the same time as the hole. But in NGC 1277, the hole is 59 per cent of the bulge mass, or 14 per cent of the mass of all the galaxy's stars.

Jackpot galaxy

"Remco's team has gone after some atypical galaxies, and it looks like they hit the jackpot," says Nicholas McConnell at the University of California, Berkeley. "This discovery throws a big wrench in the idea that supermassive black hole growth and galaxy growth are tightly connected throughout the universe."

Theories say the monsters swell by consuming matter in their host galaxies. But it is unclear how NGC 1277 had enough gas for its black hole to grow so big without the rest of the galaxy also forming lots of stars, says McConnell.

"I think this object is interesting and unusual," says Martin Rees of the University of Cambridge, who was one of the first to suggest that quasars were powered by black holes. Rees questions, however, whether the black hole is quite as big as the team calculates.

If the result stands, the black hole may be a pristine remnant of an ancient quasar, says van den Bosch. NGC 1277's stars are all old and its shape indicates it has not collided with other galaxies, so it may preserve a record of why the super-quasars grew so fast in the early universe.

The team now plan to look at five more galaxies that are superficially similar to NGC 1277, to see if they also harbour slumbering giants.

Quasars are the intensely luminous centres of distant galaxies that are powered by huge black holes. Many blast huge amounts of material out into their host galaxies, and these outflows play a key role in the evolution of galaxies.

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Ok, now let's take a look at the numbers lol ....

Scientists have discovered the most energetic quasar outflow known to date. The rate that energy is carried away by this huge mass of material ejected at high speed from SDSS J1106+1939 is at least equivalent to two trillion times the power output of the Sun. This is about 100 times higher than the total power output of the Milky Way galaxy.

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That's a helluva outflow!

The newly discovered outflow lies about a thousand light-years away from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the quasar SDSS J1106+1939. This outflow is at least five times more powerful than the previous record holder. The team's analysis shows that a mass of approximately 400 times that of the Sun is streaming away from this quasar per year, moving at a speed of 8000 km/s.

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That's really impressive.

Many theoretical simulations suggest that the impact of these outflows on the galaxies around them may resolve several enigmas in modern cosmology, including how the mass of a galaxy is linked to its central black hole mass, and why there are so few large galaxies in the Universe.

Some 2 billion ly away, the yellowish elliptical galaxy Hercules A is roughly 1000 times more massive than the Milky Way and harbors a 2.5-billion-solar-mass central black hole that is 1000 times more massive than the black hole in the Milky Way. Emitting nearly a billion times more power in radio wavelengths than our Sun, the galaxy is one of the brightest extragalactic radio sources in the entire sky.

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That thing looks powerful and heavy.

The jets are very-high-energy plasma beams, subatomic particles and magnetic fields shot at nearly the speed of light from the vicinity of the black hole. The innermost parts of the jets are not visible because of the extreme velocity of the material, which causes relativistic effects that beam the light away from us. Far from the galaxy, the jets become unstable and break up into the rings and wisps.

Astronomers found a stellar-mass black hole. It's about ten times more massive than the Sun. Bright radio emission makes it detectable.

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For the first time, astronomers have found a microquasar - a black hole devouring material from a companion star - in a galaxy beyond Milky Way. The object, pumping out X-rays and bright bursts of radio waves, was found in M31 (Andromeda Galaxy), 2.5 million ly from Earth.

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Its companion is a middle-sized, rather than a giant, star.

In this microquasar, a black hole pulls material from its companion star into a rapidly-rotating disk. The disk surrounding the black hole can become so hot it emits X-rays. The disk also propels narrow jets of subatomic particles outward at speeds nearing that of light. The jets generate strong bursts of radio emission.

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Obscuration within our Galaxy makes it difficult to study the disks of these microquasars in the Milky Way, but finding one in a neighboring galaxy means physicists probably can find many more.

The 4C +71.07 galaxy was discovered as a source of strong radio emission in the 1960s. High-energy flares were detected in the 1990s. In early November 2011, at the height of the outburst, the galaxy was more than 10,000 times brighter than the combined luminosity of all of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy.

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It's amazing that scientists can discover more and more facts about this distant galaxy and its supermassive black hole and gamma-ray emission. But there's still a long way to go ...

Located in the constellation Ursa Major, 4C +71.07 is so far away that its light takes 10.6 billion years to reach Earth. Astronomers are seeing this galaxy as it existed when the universe was less than one-fourth of its present age. At the galaxy's core lies a supermassive black hole weighing 2.6 billion times the sun's mass. Some of the matter falling toward the black hole becomes accelerated outward at almost the speed of light, creating dual particle jets blasting in opposite directions. One jet happens to point almost directly toward Earth. This characteristic makes 4C +71.07 a blazar, a classification that includes some of the brightest gamma-ray sources in the sky.

A powerful jet from a supermassive black hole is blasting a nearby galaxy in the system known as 3C321, according to new results from NASA. This galactic violence, never seen before, could have a profound effect on any planets in the path of the jet and trigger a burst of star formation in the wake of its destruction.

Theories, theories, and more theories. You'd think that with the amount of money, human, and natural resources world governments spend of defense (against each other, no less), we'd have an NX-01 by now.

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I love all these theories. We can't predict weather patterns here on Earth with 100% accuracy yet we can say how old things are billions of miles away? Please.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) successfully captured a detailed image of high density molecular gas around an active galactic nucleus harboring a supermassive black hole. The observations at the highest ever achieved reveal a unique chemical composition characterized by enhancement of hydrogen cyanide (HCN) around the black hole. A research team thought a high temperature affected by the black hole caused this peculiar chemical properties. The team expect that this unique chemical properties can be used to find black holes hidden behind dust.

Just wondering about something that I've never seen addressed anywhere.

Since the event horizon is simply the point at which escape velocity is faster than light, would a spaceship with an FTL Alcubierre warp drive like in Star Trek theoretically be able to pass through the event horizon and out the other side. Note that the ship would not go through the centre of the black hole for the obvious reason of the singularity, but if it went in at a shallow angle, could it come out again? Note that for a really big monster black hole, the tidal forces are quiet gentle, even at the event horizon. It's the "little" ones that tear you apart from a great distance.

Of course, one of the big questions here is that time stops at the event horizon from our perspective. I wonder if a physicist could answer such a question?

That "warp drive" stuff is fishy. Even if that happens it seems that Alcubierre warp drive will annihilate the black hole and it shall not pass like Gandalf says. However others say that 'warp drive' concept is promising than ever before. Read here.